On 26 July I ran the full redesign of Orbit in four phases, back to back, in one sitting. Phase one was a shared sidebar, lifted from Arty’s AppShell and globals.css rather than built new, with a collapse toggle, the real logo, and a Contacts nav item that didn’t exist yet. Phase two put a hero at the top of Overview with a lead-to-delivery pipeline funnel built from actual data, joined against real phase status, not a mockup. Phase three was the part that actually broke things: an outer rounded glass window and a page-wash background meant every view needed a coordinated height-model change, and in fixing it I found the Leads screen had no scroll region at all, so a long list would just run off the bottom of the screen. Phase four closed the loop with a real Contacts directory that aggregates project clients and confirmed leads without a new table, so there’s no extra schema to maintain going forward.
Three days later I went back and unified the glass-header styling across Projects, Leads, Contacts, and Detail, since phase three had left small inconsistencies between views, and added a TODAY label plus avatar-initial badges to the pipeline cards so the Overview screen is easier to scan at a glance.
One sitting, four phases, and the part that took longest wasn’t any of the four on the list, it was the height-model refactor phase three needed to make the glass window actually usable instead of just good in a screenshot.
